Graphics processors can include logic that is specially designed for encoding pixel data or metadata in a more compact form to reduce memory storage and transmission bandwidth and/or to improve pixel processing performance. Several parts of the rasterization pipeline, such as hierarchical depth culling, color compression, stencil compression, and depth compression store per-sample coverage masks in memory. Additionally, when using multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA), the number of samples can grow rapidly and many algorithms used by graphics processor that rely on storing per-sample coverage masks scale poorly with sample rate.